Abstract
Mixed layer depths are presented for the mid-latitude North Atlantic obtained from BT (bathythermograph) measurements for a 40 degree longitude band starting at Africa and moving west along 30 N. During February, 1959, 250 BTs were made in this region and they all show a distinct mixed layer depth greater than or equal to 85 meters. By comparing this east/west vertical temperature section with two other BT sections, one along 16 N and the other along 40 N taken one year earlier, but also in the cooling season (October, November), it is proposed that there was a northward drift in the surface layer between 16 N and 40 N that was cooled from above. Such a wide poleward flow of warm water, outside the Gulf Stream, is suggested to be the analogue of the permanent wide warm current off California in the North Pacific studied in some detail earlier.
Highlights
This manuscript’s title is taken from that of Section 141 in the classical book from the 1800s by Maury, which begins as follows [1]
Mixed layer depths are presented for the mid-latitude North Atlantic obtained from BT measurements for a 40 degree longitude band starting at Africa and moving west along 30 N
Such a wide poleward flow of warm water, outside the Gulf Stream, is suggested to be the analogue of the permanent wide warm current off California in the North Pacific studied in some detail earlier
Summary
This manuscript’s title is taken from that of Section 141 in the classical book from the 1800s by Maury, which begins as follows [1]. Not sufficient to give it the name of current; it is a drift, or what the sailors call a ‘set’. By the time this water reaches the parallel of 35 or 40 degrees it has parted with a good deal of its heat...”. Kenyon supporting data from the 1900s of a type that was unavailable to Maury. His use of the term “volume” will be justified by means of a few sets of very many BT (bathythermograph) measurements, i.e. temperature versus depth curves from the surface down to a few hundred meters. Maury was undoubtedly the first to describe a wide warm surface layer drifting poleward in any ocean, the North Atlantic in his case, since they have been uncovered in other oceans as well, starting initially and independently in the North Pacific [2] and later in the South Pacific [3]
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